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Past Masters

Secret Crocodiles and Strange Doings (or Sometimes the Magic Really Works)

Written by Bud Webster

Gilford Gadberry had a contempt for dawns badly done.  He knew how blatant and stylized the outdoor world can be in its pristine moments: the contrived shagginess of grass, the stupidity of trees, the falsity of flowers, the oafishness of the birds and their inept melody.  These scratched the smooth surface of his soul.  "Bad work, very bad work," Gadberry would opine, for he was an artist. —R. A. Lafferty, "Seven Story Dream"

          With your indulgence, I would like to preface this installment of "Past Masters" with some clarification, tinged perhaps with just a soupcon of justification.  It bears on the subject at hand, so I hope you'll grant me a moment before I plunge headlong into my customary mix of enlightenment and entertainment.  Grab a root-beer, if you've a mind to.

          Although most of these columns include some critical elements, I am not, as I've said here and elsewhere, principally a Critic, interested only in the literary aspects of my subjects.  Rather, I'm a biographer and historian—a biorian?—and my purview is above all the individual who created the work, and the significant personal characteristics that infused their work.  This can place me in an uncomfortable position at times, but if I always opted for comfort over reality, little of what I (and the few others who walk alongside) did would be of value aside from the mere satisfaction of someone else's passing curiosity.

          I am also no freer from my own prejudices and intolerance than anyone else who treads the skin of this particular oblate spheroid, and although I do try very hard to prevent that small-mindedness from affecting how I address my subjects, it is frequently difficult to clearly see where the line is.  My bad; I am, as the three damn cats habitually remind me, only human.

          So.  As I broach the discomfiting components of this essay, bear in mind that I have an obligation to be honest, and that I will do my very best to do so with fairness.  I would expect no less from anyone writing about me.[i]  Onward.

          Our subject this time around was a complex and complicated man, and that makes writing about him a knotty task.  There are no easy conclusions to be made (or at least none with any validity), and few opportunities to be glib at his expense, so I won't even try.  Lafferty made it impossible for anyone to pigeonhole him as either a stylist or a human being, whether deliberately or unintentionally, and no two readers are likely to agree about him or his writing on anything other than a very general level.

          Like his work, Lafferty was multi-layered.  He had a self-deprecating sense of humor that served as a buffer for many of the people with whom he worked and interacted.  When I met him at the 1976 worldcon, MidAmeriCon in Kansas City, I was introduced to him by Jerry Pournelle.  At the time, I was still suffering under the misapprehension that Lafferty was around the same age as the other New Wavers that I'd classed him with, and I was totally unprepared for the reality that he was already in his 60s and looked like what he was: a retired electrical engineer.  Me being super-fast on my feet and always ready with a witty comment, I responded to the intro by saying something pithy like "You're R. A. Lafferty?!"  He chuckled and shook his head, saying "Naw, I just stole his badge," and walked away laughing.  Not for the first time was I faced with having to alter my mental construct of someone I knew only from their work.

          It's easy to see why I was confused.  Nobody ever wrote—or will ever write—quite like Lafferty.  I'm not at all certain that the literature could hold two such, in fact.  This is, I think, a blessing, as I'd hate for it to blow up or deliquesce or something.  Sticky.

          Lafferty wasn't a science fiction writer, regardless of the section of the bookstore in which his titles may have appeared; rather, he was a mad fantasist, a maker of mythologies, a Wizard of Oddities.

          In addition, though, there were facets of his personality—facets which informed and influenced his writing—which will be difficult for me to write about.  Write about them I must, however, as journalistic objectivity prevents me from washing over them without mention.  Bear with me, please.

          Three primary things made Lafferty the brilliant writer he was, inevitably and indubitably.  The first, and foremost, was his unfaltering and dogmatic Catholicism.  I have heard a rumor, still floating around, that Lafferty had six female sibs, all of whom took the veil.  His sisters were all Sisters, in other words.  This is untrue; so far as I know, although he had five siblings, none were nuns.  In fact, he lived with his sister, Anna, until his death.

          Nothing odd about sf/fantasy writers being religious, of course.  C. S. Lewis made an entire career out of it, as you probably already know.  Tenets of the Church of Latter-Day Saints infuse the work of Orson Scott Card, and we won't even mention L. Ron Hubbard.[ii]  The number of stories and novels offering speculative takes on various religious ideas is legion (heh), and include some of the best-known and well-regarded works in the field: Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Simak's "The Creator," del Rey's "For I Am a Jealous People," and Michael Moorcock's Behold, the Man not the least of them.

Second, and not far behind, were his staunchly conservative political views, which caused friction between him and fellow writers and convention committees more than once.  It's not inconceivable that he and the Tea Party could have been friendly, although I suspect he valued intellect far more than most of those who considered Sarah Palin a viable candidate for high office.[iii]

          Right-wing politics aren't at all rare in the field of science fiction.  During the Viet Nam War, for instance, Judith Merril and Kate Wilhelm arranged for an anti-war full-page ad to appear in Galaxy, signed by those who opposed the war.  Word apparently got out before it appeared, and they were prevailed upon to make it a "fair and balanced" ad to include those sf writers who favored our involvement.  On the "pro-war" side, along with John W. Campbell and Robert Heinlein (and a number of others, some quite surprising) was R. A. Lafferty.  This came as a surprise to many readers who associated him with the New Wave, which had a reputation for being liberal and pacifistic (at least where South-East Asia was concerned).

          The combination of those first two aspects of Lafferty's mindset separated him from a significant number of his readers, who were unaware of his far-right-of-center rigidity for the most part.  Organized fandom was less oblivious, with convention encounters written up in fanzines and whispered about at dead-dog parties.  Fandom has always represented the smallest number of people in the field's readership, so effectively nobody really knew much of anything about this Lafferty guy.

          Noted fan Guy Lillian, whose excellent fanzine Challenger has been nominated a remarkable fourteen times (so far) for the Hugo, wrote of his response to Lafferty's novel Past Master in his introduction to his publication of Lafferty's guest of honor speech at the 1979 DeepSouthCon:

I'll never forget my reaction to Lafferty's tale of Thomas More on the golden planet Astrobe. . . . "Ah," I said.  "I have found my boy."  What I meant was that I had found a writer who—though a rock-ribbed conservative—spoke to a scrawny Berkeley hippie used to being generously tear-gassed every spring.  I'd found a poetic spirit who invested science fiction with madness and tragedy and laughter.

          The third facet, however, is where the difficulty really lies.  In his off-hours at conventions, Ray Lafferty drank heavily.  It was not an isolated or occasional thing, either.  When speaking to his colleagues, his fans, and those professionals in the field with whom he worked, the one unifying comment I heard across the board (after his genius as a writer) concerned his serious alcohol use.  I do not raise this issue to demean the man, or to denigrate him or his skills with pen and paper, but it a key fact of heavy alcohol use is that it unavoidably permeates every facet of the drinker's life.[iv]

In this, of course, he was far from alone; as a species, writers are notorious sots, and the literary world is crowded with fables of overindulgence and subsequent debauchery.  As a gopher at a Star-Trek convention some thirty-five years ago, I was assigned the task of following one such author around in order to smooth over the ruffled feathers he left in his wake.  It was almost a full-time job.  Thus, I can no more ignore Lafferty's tendency to imbibe socially than I could Zenna Henderson's Mormon childhood or Horace Gold's agoraphobia.  Those things had enormous influence on their work, as Lafferty's personality traits had on his.

          How did it affect his writing?  I asked Mike Resnick, who knew Lafferty well, and he told me this:

There were a number of people . . . who thought he was the most brilliant short story writer in the field.  But his novelettes weren't as good, and except for "Space Chanty" his novellas were unexceptional, and his novels were for the most part mediocre.  I blame his drinking for this.  If he could grind out a story in one or two sittings, he could be brilliant.  But if a novel took him 50 writing sessions, you get the feeling that each day he had to refresh his memory of what the hell he wanted to do, how he wanted to say it, etc.

Lafferty is no longer with us to be interviewed, but extensive reading of his writings shows an arch bitterness.  Again, this is nothing unusual for a writer, even in the field of science fiction/fantasy.  Cyril M. Kornbluth, for example, was flat-out eat up with bitterness.

          However, whereas Kornbluth's acrimony was directed at his fellow man (you only have to read a few random pages of "The Marching Morons" to see this; hell, the title alone is a flashing neon sign), Lafferty seems to have internalized his bitterness, perhaps as an inevitable product of his alcohol use in conflict with his doctrinaire Catholicism.  Robert Silverberg, who published a number of Lafferty's stories, said this:

He was clearly a very troubled man, and he clearly drank much too much at conventions, and no doubt was extremely lonely.  But he could be a charming guy . . . and anyone who knew his work— brilliant, of course—would instantly be aware of the disconnect between the work and the unhappy figure we saw at conventions and know that something very sad was involved.

          I have said that our subject was both complex and complicated, and there is more to Lafferty that just the above.  If I'm duty-bound to mention his politics, religion and alcohol use, I'm equally bound to shine a light on other, more positive factors of his character.  Lafferty was capable of great warmth and generosity, and many people I spoke to, both faan and pro, were forthcoming about their positive encounters.  The aforementioned (and eloquent) Guy Lillian told me this:

If, in the pursuit of accurate reporting, you insist on dwelling on Ray's flaws, mention also the love and loyalty he engendered in fans who knew him, who took care of him when he was incapacitated, because they appreciated that they were dealing with a genius with great depths of humor and sadness . . . and the strongest Catholicism of anyone in the field.  He expressed these things exquisitely through his incredible gift, with humility and verve, and was loved for it.  After St. LouisCon [the 27^th WorldCon in 1969], where he first appeared to fandom . . . a 20-year-old boy I know—myself—wrote him a fan letter.  He sent me back a page of gratitude, affection and wisdom I still cherish.  I have never known a finer soul.

          And, come on.  It's the twenty-first century.  What was once something to be desperately hidden under a rock is now so commonly spoken of that they hardly even do after-school specials about it anymore. 

          Raphael Aloysius Lafferty was born November 7, 1914, in Iowa, but before he entered school his family moved to Oklahoma.  He spent most of his life in Tulsa, working twin jobs as an electrician and a newspaper writer before enlisting in the Army in 1942.  He served in the Pacific, leaving the Army as a Staff Sergeant in '46.  He never married, but lived with a sister, Anna.[v]

          Little of this would seem to have led him to a life as a fictioneer, let alone one who would turn the stfnal world on its literary ear, but that's what he did.

          For me, it began with the July/August, 1971 If.  I had just finished part two of Farmer's The Fabulous Riverboat and was looking forward to "Occam's Scalpel" by Theodore Sturgeon, when I decided to take a break and read one of the other stories in that issue.  I had a choice between "Arnten of Ultima Thule" by Avram Davidson (one of my favorite writers), a story by an author I'd never heard of ("To Seek Another" by James A. Gotaas, to my knowledge the physicist's only fiction), and a story by R. A. Lafferty, of whom I had heard but at the time had not read.[vi]

          It was "Boomer Flats," and it blindsided me.  I'd never read anything quite like it, with its utterly unEarthly-but-of-the-earth characters ("The Comet was a long gray-bearded man (in fact, comet means a star with a beard) and small pieces were always falling off him.")  The story still knocks me out, and is one I always recommend to those who haven't read Lafferty.

          It's magic.  Not "magic realism," whatever that may mean, but just full-on, bull-goose magic.  I read it with my eyes wide and my mouth agape.  It was not the last time Lafferty would have that effect on me.

          I'm not alone in that assessment, either.  No less a critic than Brian Aldiss, in his important history of the field, Trillion Year Spree (with David Wingrove, Avon 1988), said this: "Hard to categorize other than as [a] conjuror—[a] singer of strange, sometimes acutely humorous songs—[is] R. A. Lafferty . . ."  I think that's a perfect description of Lafferty as written by someone far more knowledgeable and qualified than I.

          I frankly didn't know where this story had come from.  Being who I was at the time, my initial thought was "Wow, I bet this guy has done a lot of acid!"  Little did I know.

          Of course, it was an honest mistake; a lot of the imagery, the detail, the sheer atmosphere of Lafferty's work is almost hallucinatory in nature.  The idea that someone could have created "Boomer Flats" without having dropped a lot of Orange Sunshine[vii] never even occurred to me.

          Acid was the last thing R. A. Lafferty would have downed, considering his religious and political views.  No, all that dream-like stuff came straight out of his own unenhanced imagination, and that's almost scary.  Phil Farmer, yes; Harlan Ellison, certainly.  Lafferty, however, was almost 60 years old when that story ran, and although age isn't an absolute barrier to trippy fantasy, it's the way to bet.

          After that startling encounter, I began seeking out all the Lafferty I could find.  Not all of it was as brilliant as that first mind-blowing tale, but it was all just as unEarthly.  This wasn't science fiction as we usually think of it.  No fancy hardware, high-concept technology or plot-points turning on an astrophysical dime here.  Nor was it what Bradbury and Nelson Bond used to call "science fantasy," although it comes close in some ways.  Lafferty's work stands apart—not necessarily above, but undeniably apart—from his colleagues'.  You can't even hold it in the same (metaphorical) hand without your fingers wanting to bend in strange directions they weren't designed for.  He was sui generis, was Lafferty, and there were plenty of readers who scratched their heads and called his stories unfathomable, but oh, the mythological impact of those stories!

          In tune with Mike Resnick's words above, I find that Lafferty's longer works don't read quite as well.  That's me, not him, and it's just as much a commentary on my own flaws as it is on anything of his.  I think he was more comfortable at shorter lengths, and I certainly understand that.  The kind of elliptical worldview in which he worked would have been terribly difficult to sustain for 50 thousand words or more, and readers could have found the effort of keeping up with it daunting.

          Luckily there is plenty of short-form Lafferty out there to be read and wondered at: he published more than 250 short stories between 1959 and 1997, many of them in the original anthology series that were prevalent throughout the '70s.

          Of his novel-length works, the most cohesive is probably Past Master (Ace 1968), the fifth of Terry Carr's Science Fiction Specials and Lafferty's first novel.  Something of a stfnal roman à clef, it features the historical Sir Thomas More transported to the planet Astrobe a thousand years after the year of his death (but before his death took place).

          Astrobe, once a utopia, is declining so irrevocably that it may mean the end of the human race.  Not a good thing, they realize—hence the use of a time machine to bring in the Boss.  Well, it seemed to be a good idea at the time, but they didn't anticipate the fact that he is a sixteenth-century dude with all the concomitant limitations, not to mention a mind very much of his own.

          Honest mistake, really.  After all, he did coin the word "utopia."  See, they figured he'd fix everything up and be all gosh-wow about being in the future, and they could handle him.  Yeah, not so much—this is, after all, Sir Thomas More we're talking about here, described in Wikipedia as:

. . . lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman, and noted Renaissance humanist. He was an important councilor to Henry VIII of England and, for three years toward the end of his life, Lord Chancellor. He is recognized as a saint within the Catholic Church and is commemorated by the Church of England as a "Reformation martyr."

Does that sound to you like a guy who would sit up and bark if you waved a Beggin' Strip™ over his head?  It doesn't hurt that this isn't the Lord Chancellor's first experience with time travelers, and he takes it all in stride.  He finds allies—not all of them human—and enemies too; ones who are prepared to off themselves and take the human race with them.

Much of what ensues comes out of Lafferty's heart-felt opinion that More's 1516 novel Utopia (written completely in Latin, how cool is that?) was a satire.  Fair enough—More did use the book as a way of commenting on the mess that Europe was in at the time, and that's what satirists do.  If More didn't choose to wear a funny hat or do an impression of Buddy Hackett while writing it, well, that just means it wasn't intended to be a Mad Magazine strip.  Satire doesn't always have to be fronted by Alfred E. Neuman, you know.

Ace books, edited at the time by both Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr, devoted a great deal of paper and ink to Lafferty.  Carr published three of Lafferty's titles as part of his Science Fiction Specials, and Wollheim bought his Space Chantey for the Doubles series.

This illustrates the dichotomy of Lafferty's work in the late '60s and early '70s: was he a New Wave writer, or wasn't he?  Carr's support of the New Wave, both as a critic and as an editor, was well-known.  But wasn't Donald Wollheim a hide-bound traditionalist?

Not really.  Sure, he was a Futurian, a pulp writer and editor, and the Ace Double line included a lot of stories pulled directly from the pulps, but it shouldn't be forgotten that he was an early proponent of Philip K. Dick, Margaret St. Clair, Jack Vance and John Brunner among others, none of whom can easily be considered old-fashioned by any means.

Did I say "dichotomy"?  I could have as easily said "schizoid."  The positive response to Lafferty's work came almost exclusively from the stfnal Counter-Culture, which fact must have alternatively caused the writer both amusement and frustration.  One wonders if, while reading some fan's rave review of one of his books or stories Lafferty ever sat back, shook his head ruefully and said "Boy, if they only knew."

At this remove, it hardly matters whether he accepted his endorsement by the New Wave reluctantly or not.  I'm fairly certain that when those quarterly royalty payments came in the mail he didn't waste much time trying to figure out which percentage came from Those Damned Hippies.

Lafferty was smart enough and realistic enough (despite his stylistic extravagance) to understand that readership is readership.  If anything, he courted the antiestablishment audience by selling to such New Wave-friendly markets as Damon Knight's Orbit, Carr's Universe, Silverberg's New Dimensions and other non-traditional venues[viii].

There was a problem with his being identified with the New Wave, though: when the Wave broke and went back out to sea, it left him without much of a context.  He continued with the original anthologies, staying in both Orbit and Universe almost to the bitter end, but aside from a few other anthology appearances and a few stories in F&SF and Asimov's, the rest of his writing came out in collections published by small presses, primarily Corroboree and Chris Drumm.

In the late 1970s it was all too common to see Lafferty's hardcover collections, published earlier in the decade by Scribner, sitting in piles on chain store remainder tables and selling for $1.99.  He wasn't alone, of course, but while a number of other authors weren't adversely affected by Scribner's decision to thrift out their mid-list, Lafferty's career never recovered.  Of his sixteen novel-length books, half were published in the decade 1968-77.  The other eight were spread out over almost twenty years, and only one—1983's Annals of Klepsis—was published by a major house, Ace.  The others were, like his later collections, produced by small presses.  His last novel was Sindbad: The 13^th Voyage (Broken Mirrors 1989) and his last short story, "The Emperor's Shoestrings," appeared in a 1997 anthology published by a gaming company.

As a used-book seller, I can say that there is still a readership for the work of R. A. Lafferty, one that crosses age boundaries and appeals to people who have never even heard of the New Wave.  I find this both reassuring and enriching, as his books—even the ones Scribner so blithely dumped—command good prices.  Many of his titles have been reissued by publishers like Wildside, presenting them before an audience for whom his work is a new wonder, as well as making it possible for his "hippie" fans to read him again.

There is one more exceptional aspect to Ralph Aloysius Lafferty's career as a writer, one that I'm not sure has a parallel, and that is the disposition of his literary estate.  As I write this, his estate has been auctioned off by the family to the highest bidder.  No announcement has as yet been made, so I'm not about to reveal the high bidder, but from what I know it will be in good hands.

This singular circumstance arises from two main factors: first and foremost, Lafferty (coming as he did from a strongly Catholic family) had a lot of heirs, among then not only his sister(s), but nephews, nieces, great-nephews and great-nieces.  Aside from the numbers, they are almost certainly scattered around the country, making it difficult for decisions to be made with the participation and input of all.

The second reason stems from the cold reality that the small press, however enthusiastic and well-intentioned, has very little money to pay its authors.  They rarely pay advances of more than a few hundred dollars, and royalties are limited not only by the relatively low print runs (less of a problem with PoD) but by a lack of major-house distribution channels.  Face it; small press publishers may love what they do, but there just ain't a whole lot of money in it and never has been.

Add these two factors together and what you get is a bunch of checks for a bare few dollars being written and sent out to a hundred or more family members; it hardly seems worth the trouble, but honorable publishers have to do it.

As a result, the family offered the entire estate, print and film rights included, for a one-time payment to be divided equally.  Only the passage of time will show if this was a wise move, but chances are that it will at the very least simplify things for the family.  That is, of course, the whole point of a literary estate.

Literary estate. . . . There's more to an author's literary property than just his/her published works, and whereas Lafferty was heavily published, not everything has seen print.  Mike Resnick had this to say about a visit he made to Lafferty's digs in the mid-1980s:

When I visited his house down in Oklahoma, I opened the guest closet to hang up my coat—and saw a 3-foot-high pile of manuscripts.  He told me they were his unsold books, he had just turned 70, and he wasn't writing another word until Virginia (Kidd, his agent) sold all of these.  She found a little press up in Minnesota, but she never did sell them all.  She used to cry on my shoulder that she and I and four dozen others thought he was one of the greatest short story writers alive . . . but she couldn't find 10,000 people to buy his paperbacks or even 500 to buy his signed, numbered hardcovers.

Editor and anthologist Jonathan Strahan agrees, telling me "There's certainly a LOT of unpublished work.  About 16 novels and something like 80 short stories."

I would very much like to think that, once the Lafferty estate is settled and a new agent found to represent it, many of the unpublished stories and novels will be made available to an eager (if unfairly small) readership.

"Sui generis" was the term I used back up there a ways, but there's actually more to it than that.  I can think of only two other writers in the field who even approach him stylistically, and then only marginally; their only real resemblance is that all three seem to come from places the rest of us only find in dreams. 

The other two are Cordwainer Smith and James Tiptree, Jr.  I hasten to point out that the resemblance is all relative—they are alike mostly because they're so utterly different from everyone else.

Look at the language they use, though, even in just what they chose for titles: "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," "Entire and Perfect Chrysolite," "Nor Limestone Islands," "The World as Will and Wallpaper" by Lafferty; "Golden the Ship Was—Oh! Oh! Oh!," "The Dead Lady of Clown Town," "No, No, Not Rogov!," "The Game of Rat and Dragon" by Smith; "All the Kinds of Yes," "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," "Love is the Plan the Plan is Death," "Your Faces, O My Sisters!  Your Faces Filled of Light!" by Tiptree.

These are titles beyond the poetic, they spill over into the mythopoetic, and the stories they stand for are the work of myth-makers, no matter that the three are so very different from each other in concept and execution.  They were also almost certainly triametrically opposed politically as well, but that's only to be expected.

R. A. Lafferty left us a magnificent body of work, stories that cry and wail and laugh and bray.  They come from, and take their readers to, places few others could even conceive of, let alone limn with the skill and richness that he wielded.  Already middle-aged when he sold his first, he laid down a road paved with bright, deadpan madness for us to walk, mouths agape and eyes wide with wonder and trepidation; after all, he's taking us to worlds never seen before, and we can't know what's around that corner until the page is turned.

He was a writer of shining, bedazzling stories made all the richer by his flaws.  Would that we all could employ our own imperfections so superbly.